A NEW retailer has said a bad experience shopping on the high street led to the birth of her own maternity and nursing wear store.

Alex Macleod set up the Pudding Club after giving birth to her son Dexter four years ago.

She said: "When I was pregnant I found it so difficult to buy stylish maternity wear on the high street and although the range online was greater, I wanted to try stuff on and get advice.

"I had a particularly bad experience in Topshop where I left with a pair of jeans so big that I never grew into them.

"If only someone had told me I just needed to buy my normal, pre-pregnancy size!

"Having tried them on in a vast, communal changing room, I then had to walk out onto the shop floor to ask my husband’s opinion.

"It felt like most of the other customers, as well as the sales assistants, were in their teens and this just made me feel even more self-conscious."

With that experience in mind, Alex says she wanted to offer pregnant women 'great service, friendly advice, luxurious changing rooms and, most importantly of all, great clothes' and so The Pudding Club was born.

Find her on Minshull Street in Knutsford.

Model Milly Peel with make up provided by Lynette Page